>>48958372It’s just dumb.
Why would I have to teach a Pigeot how to fly? A Lapras how to swim? A Rhydon how to break a rock? A Scyther how to cut a tiny tree?
Like what supposedly happens if I get onto the back of a Laura’s that doesn’t know the move Surf? Does it immediately sink and drown? Become confused and unable to even fathom how to swim while being slightly heavier? Does it explode?
Do these things not just seems like something that Pokémon should just inherently be able to do without knowing a specific move?
Because of that, it feels like a very fake and tacked on way of railroading you through a specific path through the game. The railroading is fine in and of itself, but it’s weird to do it in this way, especially when there are perfectly sensible story elements that do the exact same thing. Even in the same games!
BDSP for example has the psyducks blocking the path, and they just won’t move until you get to a certain point in the game. Even in the very beginning, you can’t get past the professor’s town until you go back and talk to your mom. There’s no tree blocking the path that requires a special move, just boy Dawn yelling at you until you do it. And the same thing in the next city, you can’t leave until you go to the trainer school. You can’t go down the bike path until you get a bike. And so on, and so on.
They clearly can direct you around the map perfectly fine without the HM barriers, so why also use them when, as described above, they make so little sense in the first place? Especially compared to the other ways they can do it?
So they’re just a lame gameplay element to begin with, but on top of that, you need to use up move slots on what are mostly shitty moves.
Is that the point? Just to force you give up a slot to a shitmon HM slave or use your other mons’ move slots up? Because that sucks. It doesn’t make it hard enough to matter and nobody likes dragging around an HM slave they don’t like.
